Fuck Debt. I'm Off.by Lee Carrick

Genre:DramaSwearwords: Some strong ones.Description:Escaping to a new, debt-free life._____________________________________________________________________It was time to leave, I needed to leave and I needed
to leave now. But travelling never begins in India, Thailand or Australia. It
starts in your head and with the decisions you make at home.

There were some hurdles to jump before I was able to make my escape. Moving out of my apartment, telling my friends and family and giving my month’s notice at work, it wasn’t as simple as just ripping the plaster off and getting on a flight. But the biggest hurdle was debt. I owed around £7,000 to banks, credit card companies, mobile phone companies and store cards; companies that had loaned or extended me finance since reaching that wonderful age of eighteen. The age at which the financial system is legally allowed to begin anchoring you to society via the fear of bad credit. I had, like most young and financially naïve people, been sucked in by the offer of credit cards, store cards, overdrafts and mobile phone contracts, and it had left me with a monetary burden my working class guilt had dictated that I must keep paying. I was twenty-one years old and seven grand in the hole. I had nothing to show for it except designer clothes, inebriated memories, wild parties and the latest mobile phone.It occurred to me that for the entire sixteen years I’d spent in Government education that, in none of my mathematics classes, had the initials A.P.R. ever came up. I spent months learning algebra, trigonometry and other useless mathematical equations that I would never again use, but no one explained to me that once I got into debt I could be stuck in it like financial quicksand for my entire life. The banks don’t want you to pay your debt, it’s never supposed to end, and that is why they have such low minimum payments boldly highlighted in your monthly statements. Look, it says, this is all you have to pay. Don’t pay more, use the money and consume, buy stuff. The debt is supposed to be perpetuated much like the wars our Governments wage; we are as much debt slaves as we are wage slaves. The debt ensures we get out of bed every morning at 7 am and go to the office. It stops us from taking risks. The financial crisis was two years old now and no one seemed to grasp that finance in itself was the crisis.That week I called each company individually and requested deferment of payment for preciously one year. I had decided that if I hadn’t found work somewhere within that year that allowed me to pay my debt I would return home, get a job and continue my payments. I dialled the first customer service number. “Sorry, Mr Daniels, that’s not possible.” I dialled the second customer service number. “Sorry, Mr Daniels, that’s not possible.” The other braindead customer service agents relayed the same message. I was unperturbed.I recalled some advice that a friend’s mother had given me some years previous, she said, “You can’t go to jail for not paying your bills, son.” And she was right, what were they going to do? Lock me up? Nope. All they could do was send me angry letters. Letters I wouldn’t be reading. The next day I went into each of my banks and cancelled every one of my direct debits. I couldn’t afford to pay my debts and travel. I never paid them a single penny ever again. Fuck them; their inflexibility is what gives them the power to nail you to your job, got to make that monthly payment, don’t want the embarrassing red letters through the door. You can argue the morality of this if you like, I would understand if you did. However, the choice between my sanity and happiness versus paying £7,000 to multi-billion pound companies by continuing my soulless miserable existence was an easy one to make. The job had to go, the payments had to stop and I needed to leave.The few days following The Black Dog stalked me relentlessly.“Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, are you insane? You’ve just ended your life in the UK. How are you going to be able to come back now, you won’t be able to rent an apartment, you’ll never get a mortgage, what happens when you want to settle down, Nicky? Everything requires a credit check now, Nicky, even jobs. You’re fucked my friend, better hope you can stay in Australia or New Zealand. Say goodbye to Britain, your life here is over.”The economic stability of the capitalist world is built on a foundation of private debt. The system is designed to perpetuate this broken economy and to keep minimum wage workers at their desks everyday through fear of not being able to pay their mortgages, car payments, utility bills, credit cards, store cards and finance companies. You can have almost anything you like within reason. You can buy your house and fill it with the latest gadgets, you can have a new car every few years, you can dress in designer clothes and you can take your children on holiday once a year. Of course, your wages don’t allow you to purchase these things at full cost so you buy them on credit cards and store finance and then pay minimum payments for the rest of your life and never really own any of it. The real cost of this pointless stuff to the consumer is their freedom. And the pressure that financial imprisonment causes leads to mass depression and unhappiness where your only source of any pleasure is to buy more stuff, get more debt and exacerbate the problem.I had no intentions of playing that game. Life was out there and not at my job or in my direct debit payments.Of course, all actions have consequences. I will probably never be able to get finance in the United Kingdom ever again and that means it is impossible for me to become a financial prisoner or a mindless consumer, no mortgage or car finance, no credit card or mobile phone contract. I could never again get caught in a financial quagmire. A win win situation.My boss was annoyed when I told him, I had recently taken a promotion and a pay rise and he presumed that I knew I was leaving before I accepted the new role. I did not. It was an overnight decision. After the phone call we never spoke again.My family were a little hesitant but generally quite happy for me. They worried that I might fall foul to some awful happenings in these faraway lands and they would be helpless to save me.Most of my friends didn’t give a fuck. Moving to Edinburgh was far enough away from home that it didn’t make a difference if I was there or in Madagascar.

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About the Author

Originally from South Shields, Lee Carrick is a thirtysomething adopted Scot. His biggest passions in life are writing and travelling, and he likes to combine the two. He has been writing poetry since he was 15, but only recently began to write fiction. He was inspired to write by Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory and Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors. The Care Home, his first novella, is a McStorytellers publication.Lee’s full profile can be read on McVoices.